One afternoon he saw a brown bear get into the water, approach a beehive that hung from a trunk, and poke a branch into it in order to eat the honey. It submerged itself under the water to knock away the bees overhead or kill them with its other paw, but it kept its eyes shut while eating so as not to be blinded by the stings. It took off suddenly, sort of galloping through the water and then opening a gap in the thicket.
“Erasing your tracks is something animals don’t know how to do.” That was the greatest difference between humans and beasts. “We,” he wrote in his Diary, “know how to clean up our trails, create false clues, mutate, become others. Civilization consists in that; our ability to pretend and to deceive has allowed us to construct culture.”
When the wind was blowing from the north, he’d go out fishing early in the morning. In the very clear water of the river, only stirring slightly in the wind that came down from the mountains, it was possible to see the trout holding steady against the current; he fished with a fly, fluttering the rod over the surface with short whipping motions, and saw the fish jump, hunting after the hook in the air.
Every once in a while he went into town; the residents helped him, and sometimes he’d ask for tools or seeds in exchange for doing small chores for them; he considered these economic agreements to be on the order of bartering—not credit or sale—and a form of solidarity among neighbors that had survived the forced transactions of industrial society.
Sometimes the old town sheriff would come and visit the cabin to talk with him. “He was the gentlest man I’ve ever known,” the sheriff stated. “He’d invite me over to eat grilled rabbit with roast potatoes and a dessert made from currants and the finest honey. We’d drink a few beers that I brought in the car, and I always remember those meals as the best I’ve ever had, though I’ve been to lunches and dinners with the town and state authorities.”
They looked like two cowboys eating outdoors, heating coffee over the campfire and listening to coyotes off in the distance. There was something about life in the outdoors that was very masculine, very North American, we might say—the man who abandons his obligations to live alone on the prairie or in the woods.
One afternoon he got caught in a downpour far from home and spent the next week with a fever, doing nothing but lying stretched out in bed, drinking tea with honey. Sometimes he went to the hospital in town and had them look at his bug bites and the state of his hands, which he cared for with the dedication of a pianist.
“We took long hikes,” the sheriff recounted, “we’d go out along the river and climb up to the peak of White Mountain so we could see the valley on the other side and the highways that crossed the next state over, heading toward the chaotic cities up north.” He never found out that the man was a famous mathematician but did have a feeling that his abstract knowledge was greater than that of any other person he’d met. “He was above all else a calm man,” said the sheriff. “There’s no doubt he committed the violent acts that they say he did, but he should be asked about his reasons, because he’s the best person I’ve met in all my years as a small-town cop,” he stated in the local newspaper.
In Jefferson, Tom started seeing Mary Ann, a waitress from a bar at the Route 66 junction. He told her his name was Sam Salinger, that he was a traveler, that he was married but his wife didn’t love him anymore. He told her about his projects and came closer to revealing the truth of his plans to her than to any other person. Society was unjust, it was cruel. He made her follow his reasoning, and she arrived at revelatory conclusions on her own. That, according to what Munk wrote in his Diary, was the confirmation that he’d fallen in love with the girl. Mary Ann came forward to give an impromptu testimony after recognizing him in the photographs as the young man whom she’d been intimate with for several months, and she kept referring back to one evening, when Tom, wrapped in a gray overcoat but naked underneath, had revealed to her that he was planning to abandon everything and travel to a cold place in Canada to start another life. How did that sound to her? Would she come with him and live near the ice caps? The girl told him she needed to think about it, but she decided to stop seeing him. She’d supposed he was an army deserter, since there were so many. She thought he was a strange man, very educated and thoughtful, who acted like he wanted to forget some crime or like he’d escaped from prison.
Sometimes, during the summer, Tom worked at the sawmill. A
